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(Sharecast News) - Sharp falls in the semiconductor space and rising oil prices weighed on sentiment on stock markets across Asia on Monday, with most major indices finishing lower.
Stocks in Hong Kong and Singapore outperformed, ending the session moderately higher with the Hang Seng and STI both up around 0.4%.
However, losses were recorded elsewhere, with the Nikkei 225 down 0.8% after heavy losses for tech investment giant SoftBank and Tokyo Electron, while the Shanghai Composite fell 0.1% and the Sensex fell 0.2%.
South Korea's KOSPI, meanwhile, dropped 3.3% on the back of the outsized weighting of chip names on the index, with heavyweights SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics both falling sharply.
Other notable fallers included TSMC in Taiwan Kioxia Holdings in Tokyo.
Weighing on the semiconductor and AI sectors were recent comments by Anthropic boss Dario Amodei, who called for the pace of AI development to slow down due to "serious" risks associated with the rapid pace of advancements.
"I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence - not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up," Amodei wrote in an online essay.
"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."
The comments, publicly backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk, hammered shares across sectors related to AI, notably in the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
"Dario Amodei's call for a slower pace of frontier-model development [...] suddenly forced markets to contemplate something they have spent most of the past three years treating as almost unthinkable: what happens if the AI race deliberately takes its foot off the accelerator?," said market commentator Stephen Innes in an email.
Also weighing on risk appetite was a renewed increase in oil prices after new strikes on Saudi Arabia, attacks on vessels near the Strait of Hormuz and the shutdown of Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline. Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate were up 2.8% at $107.52 and $102.86 a barrel, respectively.